End of the year slide show and puppet shows.

Wow. I can't believe that this year is already over. All I did was blink and suddenly it's May 29th and I've just finished fighting back tears after saying goodbye to so many wonderful, wonderful people. Thank you so much for the privilege it's been working with you and your children. I have been deeply touched as I have seen these kids work and learn and grow. They have inspired me to do more of my best, as I've seen them do this past year. Each child has made a unique and irreplaceable contribution to our class. I've told my fellow teachers over and over this year, but we have the BEST class and I will never forget it

CLICK ON THE LINKS BELOW TO VIEW THE VIDEOS.

How Grandmother Spider Stole the Sun.

Hippo's Toothache.

2013-2014 Slideshow.


Students of the Year:

I love you all! Have a fantastic summer!

Mrs. D
P.S. If you are interested in keeping in touch, email me at ashleydean7588@gmail.com.

Week 33

Sorry for the no-post last week! Here's what this past week looked like:

Reporting. In Superhero Social Skills we talked about "reporting"--particularly about reporting dangerous or bullying situations. First, students need to decide if it's something to report. Students should report if someone is/could be hurt, if they have already tried asking someone who is bothering them to stop and they continue to bother them, if someone is pressuring them to do something they know is inappropriate, etc. Students not only practiced in role plays, but we read a few stories about bullying and shared some experiences of our own and talked about how to deal with them.

Testing, testing, testing! This week we finished up UAA testing (Utah Alternative Assessment--for students who are unable to take the regular standardized tests in 3rd grade and up), 2nd grade Developmental Reading Assessment, and language arts SAGE testing for some of our 4th graders! We are almost done! Next week we will finish up the DRA for our older students and do SAGE math testing for our 4th graders and then the testing will be over! If you have any questions about how your child is performing, please feel free to contact me.

Everything is AWESOME. We've been practicing our dance festival dance to the song "Everything is Awesome" from the Lego Movie several times a week and the kids are really getting the hang of it! Next week we will start practicing outside. We have also ordered some Lego-themed tee shirts that the students will decorate. Make sure to mark your calendars--May 23rd is our big performance!

Landforms. We are continuing our unit on landforms--students have learned about mountains, canyons, islands, lakes, glaciers, etc, and where they can find real-life examples of these in our world!

Coming Up:
May 16th - Bowling Field Trip. Look for permission slips on Monday of next week. Reminder: if you would like to volunteer to accompany us on the field trip, you need to have a background check done. We are excited about this field trip--it will provide an opportunity to practice a lot of practical skills: money and math, staying cool, etc.

Homework Hero AND Student of the Week:

CARSON SMITH!!

FOR BEING OUR ONLY STUDENT TO TURN IN ALL HOMEWORK THIS WEEK AND FOR USING GREAT SOCIAL SKILLS. WELL DONE!

Week 31

Happy Easter, everyone! It was good to be back at school this week. Here's what we did:

Recognizing Emotions. In Superhero Social Skills this week we focused on learning to recognize emotions. That meant that we would look for body signals in each other as well as for clues in the environment or situation to help us determine how someone is feeling. We played some fun charade games and watched some familiar videos but stopped frequently to noticed the emotions of the main characters. Sorry I don't have the videos for this unit posted--I can't get the CD to work on my computer for some reason. I will post it as soon as I can get things figured out.

Book Fair. This week the Scholastic Book Fair was open after school. I hope you all had a chance to go look at it!

Landforms. In science we began studying landforms--natural and unique shapes in the earth--such as archipelagos, beaches and canyons. We studied not only what they are, but where we can find examples of them in the United States. See if your child remembers with U.S. state is an archipelago or where the Grand Canyon is.

Easter celebrations. On Friday we had some Easter fun. For art we made some cute paper Easter baskets.

We also did some cooking and put together our own "bunny mix" (similar to a Chex party mix). I tell you, so many of our students just love cooking. I love it too--it provides a great opportunity for some basic reading skills, direction following, and we always do some comprehension at the end of the activity.

For reading that day, we had a reading challenge Easter egg hunt. Inside each egg was a reading question that the students had to answer in order to find out where the next egg was. It was so much fun, they hardly even noticed that they were doing academic work! Here are a couple of pictures of the hunt (sorry we couldn't get everyone!):

In addition to the clues, each egg also contained a few different kinds of "jelly beans". Once everyone had finished with their egg hunt, we sorted the jelly beans in to four categories and practiced making predictions about what each jellybean would taste like. Some students were definitely surprised! We had sour beans, fruity beans, chocolate beans and hot & spicy beans. But EVERYONE was brave enough to try each one.

In P.E. we also had an egg relay race, where students had to balance plastic eggs on their spoons.

Coming Up:

Next week is Spirit Week

Monday - Hat Day
Tuesday - Pajama Day
Wednesday - Crazy Hair Day
Thursday - Twin/Decade Day
Friday - School Spirit Day

Next week we will also be doing a LOT of testing. SAGE testing will resume for some of our 4th graders - science, this time. We will also be doing some UAA testing for 3-4th graders who are not taking the SAGE test.

Homework Heroes:

JUSTIN

BRODY

CARSON

KAI

SEAN

ELIAS

Student of the Week:

Dallen!!

FOR EXCELLENT BEHAVIOR IN INCLUSION.

Mrs. D

P.S. I had to include this picture here:

This is us, hiding.

On April Fool's Day we played a little joke on Dallen and Mrs. W as they came back from class. We turned the lights off and everyone stood by the wall next to the door, very quietly. When they walked in the room, pretty confused, we all said, "April Fool's!" Everyone got a kick out of it, including Dallen, who initially jumped several feet in the air.